Alcander, Day 92

The gods are awfully short of clarity.

I mean, I accept that they work in mysterious ways. All of my people know this. They're powerful, they're important, we do what they tell us, but they're not to be trusted with your wife. If I had a wife, of course, but that's beside the point.

And of course Heracles is no better. I mean, he's a great hero, a great man to live up to (well, except for the bits where he isn't), but as a god he's no better than a god. Consider all that he's done to muck with my life at this point. Perhaps the life I was leading would have been sinful. Perhaps I would have bet my father's entire fortune in an ill fated turn of the dice in the hopes of winning a night with a woman who only would have given me the pox that would have rotten my man parts off and killed me anyway, but so what? It only would have led to me dying mad and broke in a gutter somewhere. At least I might have been mad enough to not realize that, while brave men rested, the entire bloody world has been conquered by the twin dark forces of the evil and the irritating.

Consider Tupper. I thought that perhaps Heracles wanted me to help him, to make him manly. But does he listen? No! Now he follows me around every bloody place that I go, shrieking any time I so much as touch something. As though it is a horror for me to try and find out what things are. As though I haven't put back down everything that I've let loose, anyway. Sometimes evil things need to be let out of their cages. It's the only way you can smite them properly.

Even Arcadius, who I have sometimes considered an honorable enough man, now feels compelled to speak to me as though I am a child.

Why did I even return here? I'm barely off the boat and the irritating bard has shown up with a friend, the sort of honorable gentleman who thinks that a fair fight is where he flies in the air and throws spells at the honorable samurai who was expecting a true fight.

At least soon we'll return to the jungle, to fight that damn undead thing. Perhaps afterwards I can convince the group to head North. If the gods are not simply being obtuse in a new, more irritating and more spectacular fashion, it seems that there might be a great battle there. Two great battles in a row would be nicely invigorating. If the gods are just (and they are not, but a man can still hope that there will be an exception for once), perhaps they shall make men out of some of these imbeciles. Or at least take them from this world. Let Tupper be the problem of the gods.

Wait, Heracles, no, do not let that happen. If Zeus had to listen to his squeeling he'd likely level us all with thunderbolts just to make the imbecile shut up.

Or perhaps he'll take me instead. A noble death seems like a fine thing right now. A mad charge into an evil foe to assure me a place in the Fields, and then make it over.

Yes. That sounds, nice.

Battle cannot come soon enough.